It was popularly believed in the 1930s that the legendary bluesman Robert
Johnson, who inspired Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones and Eric
Clapton, sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical gifts. It was
believed Johnson had the ‘Evil Eye’ and was murdered because of his alleged
power over women. He seduced the wife of a beer hall owner who in revenge laced
the musician’s whisky with arsenic. Many moralists saw his fate as a punishment
for dealing with the powers of darkness.

Johnson is said to have sold his soul to Old Nick during a midnight ceremony
at a crossroads. However, that story did not originate with him. In the 1920s
and 1930s there are numerous tales of black musicians and gamblers signing a
pact with a mysterious ‘man in black’ at the crossroads. Famous examples are the
black singer Clara Smith and Robert Johnson’s namesake Tommy Johnston, a decade
before him. The dark stranger has been identified by some writers as either the
Christian Devil or the West African trickster god Eshu, worshipped in voodoo and
taken to the southern states of America by black slaves.

While there is little evidence of modern pop and rock musicians actually
‘selling their souls’ to the ‘Devil’, the link between popular music and the
occult is a strong one. Christian fundamentalists have predictably seen the
widespread use of magical and occult symbols in rock music as evidence it is the
work of Satan, but the truth is far stranger than their religious fantasies.

Sometimes the alleged connections of famous rock musicians with occultism
surfaced in apocryphal showbiz gossip or rumour. For example, everyone
knows that ill-fated glam rock star Marc Bolan studied as a sorcerer’s
apprentice with a magician in a French chateau (in fact he actually admitted
it), that the late pop diva Dusty Springfield allegedly belonged to a satanic
group called the Temple of the Prince in Manchester, and that Jim Morrison of
The Doors married a Wiccan high priestess (which was true).

Then there was the 1970s British musician Graham Bond, accused by his fellow
R & B artist Long John Baldry of sacrificing his pet cat in a magical ritual.
Bond told his groupies he was one of the illegitimate sons of the infamous
‘black magician’ Aleister Crowley, and that his musical output was designed to
contact “higher forces.” Bond also believed he had been cursed by a fellow
occultist. When in 1974 the musician fell in front of a train on the London
Underground in mysterious circumstances, many thought the curse had worked.

The Beatles & the Rolling Stones

The Beatles are well known for flirting with Eastern mysticism and
transcendental meditation during their psychedelic hippy stage in the late
1960s. They may also have had darker interests. For instance, the Great Beast
666, Aleister Crowley, is featured (top left corner above) in the photomontage
of “people we most admire” on the cover of the Fab Four’s famous album Sergeant
Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Antiquarian bookseller and Crowley bibliographer Timothy D’Arch Smith relates
how the Beatles attended an exhibition of rare books on witchcraft and the
occult he held in Swinging London. Jane Asher, Paul McCartney’s then girlfriend,
had suggested the visit to him and, according to D’Arch Smith, encouraged him to
buy rare books as an investment.

If the Beatles were mildly interested in the occult, then their main rivals
for the pocket money and affection of teenage girls, the Rolling Stones, were
definitely involved in a more dramatic way. Despite their respectable
middle-class backgrounds, in the Sixties the Stones were deliberately promoted
as the ‘bad boys of pop’. It now seems this was a marketing ploy by their then
manager Andrew Oldham, and is summed up in the famous newspaper headline, ‘Would
you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ If the parents of Middle England
had known about their dabbling in the occult, the answer may have been in the
negative.

Lucifer Rising

The so-called ‘satanic’ influence on the Stones was through the avant-garde
filmmaker, Luciferian and Tinseltown gossip-queen Kenneth
Anger. He had become interested in the
band’s career and particularly in guitarist Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita
Pallenberg, a German film actress and model. Jones had some unusual interests,
and both he and the pop singer Robert Palmer were fascinated by the master
musicians of Joujouka in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco in North Africa. These
musicians claimed to be still practising the ancient rites of the goat-footed
god Pan. Jones went so far as to travel to North Africa to record an album of
the tribal music performed by this pre-Islamic cult.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Robert
Palmer described how he had witnessed one of these rites to Pan. He said the
dancing tribesmen appeared to be in an ecstatic trance with their eyes rolled
back in their heads. Palmer said that when “the power came down” the dancer was
suddenly “not there.” In fact “something else” was looking out of his eyes,
which began to “glow like ruby lasers” (Rolling Stone, 23 March 1989).

Kenneth Anger believed that Anita Pallenberg and Brian
Jones, who was to drown in mysterious circumstances in the swimming pool of his
Sussex mansion, were witches. Allegedly, Jones showed the filmmaker an extra
nipple he had on his inner thigh and told him: “In another time they would have
burned me [as a witch].” Extra nipples were regarded by witch-hunters as a sign
of the Devil’s Mark. A friend of Anita Pallenberg, Tony Sanchez, believed she
kept her drug stash hidden in an old carved wooden chest in her flat. One day he
looked inside. Instead of drugs he found it contained bones and pieces of fur
and skin from “strange animals.” Mick Jagger’s one time girlfriend Marianne
Faithfull described how she and Pallenberg used to sit for hours reading aloud
passages from Robert Graves’ book The White Goddessand studying the
ancient Celtic tree alphabet.

In her autobiography Marianne Faithfull claims the gay Anger had a crush on
the bisexual Stones’ singer which was not reciprocated. When the filmmaker’s
sexual overtures were rejected he became a bit of a nuisance. One day he turned
up at the couple’s house in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea and bizarrely threw several
books by the 18th century poet and mystic William Blake through the window.
Jagger responded in disgust at this stunt by burning all the copies of the
occult works that Anger had given him by Crowley and the French occultist
Eliphas Levi.

Despite this, Marianne Faithfull got involved in Anger’s
experimental movie Lucifer Rising, allegedly financially sponsored by
Anita Pallenberg, and with a score originally to be composed by Mick Jagger.
Initially the Stones’ singer was to play the leading role in the film, but he
got cold feet and backed out of the project altogether. In the first version,
made in 1967, the lead was taken by his brother Chris Jagger. Marianne Faithfull
became involved in the second version filmed in 1972 and she agreed to take the
part of the demon-goddess Lilith.

Faithfull described the baby-slaying Lilith as one of the
classic female archetypes and compared her with pagan goddesses such as Diana,
Astarte, Ishtar, Aphrodite and Demeter. However, she added: “From the view of
patriarchy, of course, she was the pure incarnation of evil” (Faithfull by
Marianne Faithfull with David Datton, 224). Interestingly, the part of the
ancient Egyptian god Osiris in the film was played by Donald Cammell, son of
Charles Cammell, a friend and biographer of Crowley. The younger Cammell made
his own films including the controversial Performance in co-operation
with Nic Roeg. It starred Mick Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and the archetypal
English actor Edward Fox. Donald Cammell committed suicide in the 1990s

The shooting of Lucifer Rising took place in Egypt
and Faithfull claims that as soon as the crew and cast arrived in the country it
was obvious Anger did not know what he was doing as either a film director or a
magician. At that stage in her life Faithfull was seriously addicted to heroin
and admits she did not know what she was doing on the set either. The whole
thing was a recipe for disaster. The last sequence of the film was a winter
solstice rite shot at a Neolithic site in Germany. During it, Faithfull managed
to fall off a mountain. She somersaulted and landed on her feet without
sustaining any injury. This convinced her that her magic was stronger than
Anger’s. In her autobiography she dismissed him as a “kitsch occultist” and “a
witch out of a Hollywood tabloid.”

Marianne Faithfull claims that both Mick Jagger and the Stones’ lead
guitarist Keith Richards were also sceptical about Anger’s “satanic hocus-pocus”
and did not take any of it seriously. However, after an incident involving the
magician at the house in London now shared by Richards and Anita Pallenberg,
Faithfull became seriously spooked out. As a result, she believed she was under
psychic attack. Allegedly, she wore a clove of garlic around her neck and slept
in a circle of lit candles for protection. Whether this paranoid behaviour was
connected to her heroin addiction is not known.

One of Marianne Faithfull’s tracks on her comeback album Broken
English is called ‘Witches Song’. She dedicates it as “my ode to the wild
pagan woman I know and have always around me.” Faithfull says she got the idea
for the song after she and Mick Jagger visited an exhibition in Madrid of
paintings on the theme of the Witches Sabbath by the Spanish artist Goya. Her
autobiography also describes an incident when she and Jagger took LSD before
visiting Primrose Hill in North London “where the ancient ley lines are supposed
to run” and where modern neo-druids hold their seasonal ceremonies. Under the
influence of the acid the couple saw “a great face in the sky” they were
convinced was the head of the Celtic giant god Bran. This seems to fit with
Faithfull’s professed pagan beliefs. In her autobiography she says she believes
not in God the Father, but in the Great Goddess and her consort Pan.

Jimmy Page & Aleister Crowley

In 1969 the satanic aura around the rock mega-group Led Zeppelin reached such
a pitch that, in echoes of Robert Johnson, rumours circulated in the Los Angeles
music scene that its members had signed a pact in their own blood with the Devil
to gain fame.

James Patrick ‘Jimmy’ Page’s well-known interest in the
occult fuelled these rumours of the group’s alleged satanic activities.
Described by the magazine AllMusic as “one of the all-time most
influential, important and versatile [rock] guitarist and songwriters,” Page had
been interested in alternative religions since childhood. While a member of the
Yardbirds, he had hung out with Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg at their studio
flat in South Kensington. Page has never hidden his interest in Aleister
Crowley, and Led Zeppelin’s famous album Rune has a photograph of the
Great Beast on its cover. In an interview with Sounds magazine in 1976
Page is quoted as saying that Crowley was “a misunderstood genius of the
twentieth-century.”

Jimmy Page purchased as many artefacts and first edition
books belonging to Crowley that he could find. In 1969, Kenneth Anger rented
Crowley’s old (seriously haunted) house Boleskine on the shores of Loch Ness
where he lived in the 1900s for a few months. When it came on the market for
sale, Anger suggested to Page he should buy it. This he did and hired an occult
artist called Charles Pace to paint suitable atmospheric magical murals in each
room. The Led Zeppelin guitarist could be seen driving around the area like a
Scottish laird in a Land Rover with a stack of stag’s antlers on the bonnet.
Page also visited Sicily and contemplated buying the old villa where Crowley
established his ‘Abbey of Thelema’ in the 1920s.

In the early 1970s Page opened an occult bookshop in
Kensington called The Equinox. It was done out in a futuristic style with glass
bookshelves and display cabinets and chrome steel pillars. Under its auspices,
Page published a facsimile of Crowley’s 1904 edition of the medieval grimoire Goetia.

Kenneth Anger approached Jimmy Page and asked him to
provide a soundtrack for his ongoing film project Lucifer Rising.
Unfortunately, the two men fell out when Page only managed to produce 23 minutes
of music and Anger wanted 28 minutes. The filmmaker accused Page of being a mere
dabbler in the occult and a drug addict so out of his mind he could not finish
the film score. However, in 1976 Page lent Anger the basement of his London
house for film editing purposes. Again, the two men did not see eye to eye and
Page allegedly cursed the filmmaker. Page later branded the incident as “silly
and pathetic” and said he still respected Anger as an occultist.

There has been a lot of debate about whether Jimmy Page
ever belonged to one of the modern versions of Crowley’s magical group the OTO (Ordo
Templis Orientis or Order of the Eastern Temple). In fact, the jury seems to be
out on whether Page is an actual magical practitioner at all. In this respect New
Musical Express journalist Nick Kent dismisses rumours the guitarist spends
his time with “his head in a cowl ritually slaughtering various species of
livestock.” Kent instead says from his experience Page is “just another seeker
after esoteric knowledge, a collector of dusty old books, and committed student
of the ‘magical’ information that was supposedly contained in their yellowed
pages.”

Although Jimmy Page’s interest in Crowley and the occult is
well known, his Led Zeppelin colleague Robert Plant also has esoteric interests.
These manifest in a study of folklore, Norse and Germanic mythology, and reading
‘sword and sorcery’ novels. Plant spent most of his life living on the Welsh
Border and in an interview with the rock music magazine Kerrang! he said
he often visited the Black Mountains in South Wales. There he rediscovered his
roots in the local Celtic culture. Using an ordnance survey map, he wandered the
hills visiting Bronze Age sites and places where the Welsh had battled with the
Saxons.

David Bowie

Another famous rock star who openly admits an interest in
the occult, magic and Crowley is David Bowie (born David Robert Jones). In the
1970s he says he studied the Kabbalah and “Crowleyism” and more recently became
interested in Gnosticism. On a practical level the singer used Tarot cards and a
crystal ball for divination, an ouija board to contact spirits, and performed
magical rituals for exorcism and psychic protection. His early album Hunky-Dory features
a song called ‘Quicksand’ that references both Crowley and the Victorian magical
group Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

According to David Bowie’s wife Angie in her autobiography,
her husband’s interest in the occult was due to his desire to outdo Jimmy Page.
Allegedly, he saw the Led Zeppelin guitarist as a magical rival. Bowie
eventually decided, possibly because of Page’s interest in him, that Crowley and
his works were “small shit.” For that reason he began studying Tibetan magic
which he claimed was far more powerful than anything the Great Beast or Page had
ever done.

In an interview with New Musical Express (February
1997) David Bowie admits he had been into “old fashioned magic” in the 1970s,
and said he always believed Crowley was a charlatan. He reveals that Arthur
Edward Waite, a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn, and the Welsh-born
occultist Dion Fortune, author of Psychic Self-Defence, have been
important to him. In fact, Bowie used Fortune’s book extensively when he
believed he was under psychic attack. Talking of a house he rented in Los
Angeles in 1975, Bowie said he decorated it with ancient Egyptian artefacts.
This was because, “I had this more than passing interest in Egyptian mysticism
and the Kabbalah…” (Stage Fascination: David Bowie the Definite Story by
David Buckley, 235).

Angie Bowie says the musician was heavily involved with
occult activities in 1975-76. This coincides with a period when he used cocaine
and she believed this made him paranoid. Apparently, Bowie stored bottles of his
own urine in the fridge and carefully disposed of his nail and hair clippings.
This was in case magical practitioners obtained these personal items in order to
cast spells on him. He also set up an altar in his sitting room with black
candles on it, painted occult symbols on the walls, and performed magical
banishing rituals for protection. Angie Bowie once witnessed him exorcise a
swimming pool he believed was haunted.

When the couple were viewing properties to rent or buy in
Hollywood they came across an old house with a pentagram of five-pointed star
painted on the floor. Bowie freaked out and said he could not live there as the
building had been used for black magic rites. One day he phoned his wife and
told her witches were trying to steal his semen. Allegedly they wanted to create
a test-tube baby and then sacrifice it in a satanic rite. It turned out the
‘witches’ were just some innocent groupies he met in a bar.

At this difficult point in his life Bowie also flirted with
neo-Nazism. He explained in an interview with the British rock music journalist
Tony Parsons in 1993 that this was only because he was fascinated by the use of
occult symbols like the swastika by the original Nazi Party in Germany. He was
interested in their quest for the Holy Grail because he was also searching for
its meaning (Stage Fascination: David Bowie the Definite Story by David
Buckley, 235-236). Bowie once said that it might be a good idea to have a
fascist dictatorship in Britain, although he later denied he was serious and
claimed it was a joke.

Black Sabbath & Heavy Metal

Partly as a reaction to the hippy ‘flower power’ and ‘peace
and love’ movement of the late Sixties, heavy metal bands began to appear using
violent satanic imagery and playing loud over-amplified rock music. Groups such
as Warlock, Saxon, Venom, Motley Crue, W.A.S.P., Slayer, Iron Maiden, Incubus
and Bathory put out albums with covers decorated with human skulls, pentagrams,
hooded figures, gravestones, goat-headed demons and vampires. One of the most
famous and pioneering heavy metal bands Black Sabbath came out of Birmingham in
the industrial Midlands of England in 1969. They combined heavy guitar riffs
with satanic inspired lyrics and an obsession with the gothic dark side that
soon gave them a dedicated, if rather odd, fan base.

The band’s distinctive name was taken from an old horror
movie starring English actor Boris Karloff, famous for his movie interpretation
of Dr. Frankenstien’s monster. Originally, Black Sabbath started out as a
jazz-blues band until they became influenced by the ‘black magic’ novels of the
thriller writer Dennis Wheatley and books by Aleister Crowley. Their leader
‘Geezer’ Butler was lent a 16th century grimoire or book of magic. Its contents
so freaked him out that he locked it in a cupboard before going to bed. During
the night he had a spectral visitation from a dark shadowy figure who stood at
the end of his bed. In the morning when Butler opened the cupboard the grimoire
had vanished and it was never seen again.

Butler claims the band was invited to play a gig at a
Witches Sabbath at Stonehenge, which sounds like something out of a Dennis
Wheatley novel. When the boys refused the chief “warlock” of the coven ritually
cursed the band. Geezer says he consulted a “white witch” to get the curse
lifted and was told the band had to wear crosses to ward off the evil forces
directed at them. Apparently, lead singer Ozzy Osbourne’s father, who was a bit
of a handyman, made the crosses for each of the band members to wear.

Ozzy Osbourne always denies he was seriously into the
occult, although he did have his Tarot cards read – twice. Famously he said the
only evil spirits that interest him are whisky, gin and vodka! He describes the
strange people attracted to the band, who habitually wear white face make-up and
black hooded robes, as “freaks.” Ozzy says the only good thing about all the
satanic stuff is it gave the band free publicity increasing their record sales
and bank accounts.

Some of the heavy metal bands took their interest in
witchcraft and magic more seriously. One of these, for a while, was Black Widow
who played a mixture of progressive rock and folk music and used demonic imagery
in their act based on serious research. In 1968 the group’s manager approached
Maxine and Alex Sanders, the so-called ‘King and Queen of the Witches’. He
wanted to know if the couple could recommend a nubile young witch with dancing
skills to take part in their new stage act. This featured a magician played by
one of the band’s members conjuring up a demon who was once an ancient goddess
called Ashtaroth.

Several professional dancers auditioned for the part of the
demon-goddess. Each one suffered fainting fits during rehearsals and felt they
were being possessed by an evil spirit. In desperation the band wanted to hire a
real witch who would not be fazed by the magical goings-on. Black Widow’s
manager said the Sanders were happy to help and he described them as “clever
business people” only interested in making money in any way they could.

A member of the Sanders’ coven volunteered for the role and
the rehearsals were successful. Unfortunately, on the day of the first
performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London, she fell ill. Alex Sanders
volunteered his wife and the high priestess of the coven Maxine as a suitable
stand-in. When the lead singer of Black Widow playing the sorcerer invoked the
demon-goddess and accidentally stepped out of the protective magical circle, she
was supposed to attack him. In her autobiography Maxine Sanders says the singer
complained afterwards about the bruises he suffered from the physical assault by
the ‘Queen of the Witches’.

Danny Carey

Another more contemporary band called Tool and its lead
singer Danny Carey are well known for their interest in all things magical.
Carey collects rare limited edition publications by such modern occult
practitioners as Crowley, Kenneth Grant, Austin Osman Spare and Andrew D.
Chumbley. During their recordings of albums, Tool use magical banishing rituals
to get rid of unwelcome influences left in the studio by previous performers.
They have also been known to employ talismans and occult sigils used by the
Elizabethan magician and astrologer Dr. John Dee in their gigs. During a South
American tour, local Christian workers refused to handle the band’s equipment
because it was “satanic.”

The 1990s saw a sinister link established between rock
music and Satanism with the rise of the so-called ‘black metal’ or ‘death metal’
groups. These new bands were committed to an anti-Christian philosophy of
anarchism, nihilism, violence and an obsession with death that made Black
Sabbath stage appearances look like a vicar’s tea party. Possibly the most
dramatic and violent manifestation of this new trend was in Scandinavia. A new
cultural trend united satanic beliefs with atavistic forms of neo-paganism and
extreme nationalist right-wing politics promoting racism and white supremacy.
This deadly combination was to lead to arson and murder.

In 1992 an ancient wooden stave church was burnt down in a
firebomb attack. Rumours began circulating that hard-core black metal fans were
responsible for the outrage. It was alleged they were pagan Viking revivalists
who expressed neo-Nazi views. Further church burnings and graveyard desecrations
took place followed by murders involving rival groups of black metal fans and
biker gangs. Media reports said that self-styled teenage satanists saw
neo-Nazism and rock music as cultural stepping stones to a revival of
Aryan-based paganism. Because the historic Christian churches were built on the
site of pagan temples, they had to be destroyed before the heathen ‘old
religion’ could be established again.

Today the number of rock bands using satanic and occult
imagery is increasing. The new ‘high priest’ of the Church of Satan in the USA,
Boyd Rice, is himself a musician. Critics have dubbed his musical output as
“sonic terrorism as an art form.” Strangely enough, his satanic master, Anton
LaVey, who found the Church of Satan in the 1960s, preferred Gershwin and Cole
Porter with his bedtime cocoa.

It seems certain that in the future wherever and however
rock music is played, there will always be those who claim, quite literally, the
Devil has the best tunes.

When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led
Zeppelin by Mick Wall, Orion Books, 2008

Led Zeppelin: From Early Days to Page and Plant by
Ritchie Yorke, Virgin Books, 1999.

.

MICHAEL HOWARD became interested in the connections
between rock music and the occult while working for a major record company in
London in the 1970s. He is the author of Secret Societies (Destiny Books,
2009) and Modern Wicca: from Gerald Gardner to the Present (Llewellyn,
USA 2010). He can be contacted by email at mike@the-cauldron.fsnet.co.uk.